At the end of The Slum, Bertoleza discovers that the manumission letter she was given was false, is claimed by her former owner, who arrives with two policemen, and kills herself with a kitchen knife before she can be taken away. It is the outcome of a deception that João Romão set up in the first chapter and uses again in the twenty-first.
In chapter I, he forges the letter, keeps the savings she had put aside for manumission and takes her as his shop clerk, maid and lover. In chapter XXI, with the marriage to Zulmira decided, she is everything that reminds him of his past: "Bertoleza had to be crushed, had to be suppressed, because she was all that was bad in his life!". He thinks of strangling her, backs off and, when Botelho asks whether she was a slave, he finds the way out: return her to her owner. Botelho sums up the plan: "Well! Then the thing is simple!... Send her back to her master!", and later, "the little men arrive, they claim the slave in the name of the law, and you hand her over".
The narrator tells the kitchen scene in a few lines. Bertoleza, squatting, scaling fish, recognizes the eldest son of the first owner and "in a flash of great danger understood the situation". The policemen draw their sabers, and before anyone can reach her, she "with one sure, deep stroke had slashed her belly from side to side". She dies there, in the kitchen.
The next scene is the one with the diploma. João Romão, who had fled to the darkest corner of the warehouse, sees the commission of abolitionists arrive in evening dress and orders them shown into the drawing room. The book ends without commenting on the contrast. The text also does not say whether what drives Bertoleza is the fear of captivity or the end of everything she had done for him.